Who’s this? asks Madison, coming to the door and standing beside Lydia. Hari’s visibly intimidated by the sight of her, taking a step back: Lydia guesses he hasn’t seen a Logi up close before. She tries to remember how she felt the first time she met one, at her interview for LSTL. She can’t remember his name now. They didn’t actually need a Logi to be there but they wanted to see how you reacted. Of course it was an advantage if you’d met them before, which lots of the other applicants had. But Lydia was excited—perhaps a bit too excited, she worried she’d blown the interview by talking too much while not answering the questions properly. Strange how commonplace it is to her now.
Maybe it’s not so surprising lots of people think they don’t exist, if they see them only via media.
This is Hari, Lydia tells Madison, then turns back to him. “You’d better come inside.” Probably someone has already spotted Hari on the doorstep and posted an image, but the less time she spends talking to him in public view, the better. Hari enters the residence and nods to Madison respectfully as he walks past, a gesture she won’t really get.
“When did the cops let you go?” Lydia asks him as she closes the door.
“A few hours ago,” Hari replies. “I came down here but the place was swarming so I waited for them to go away—what happened? Why were they all here?”
“It’s complicated and … weird—did they treat you OK?”
“Not really.”
“Sorry. I didn’t tell them it was you—I never thought it was you.”
“You did call the cops on me though.”
“I’m sorry. I panicked. Those guys you were with—”
He holds up a hand and nods. “I know, I can see how it must’ve looked. Also, those guys were arseholes.”
Why is he here? asks Madison impatiently: Lydia hadn’t quite finished explaining things to her.
I don’t know, says Lydia. She’d like to know this too, so she asks Hari but frames it as Madison’s question.
“Oh,” he replies, “the capsule hostel I was staying at recycled all my stuff when I didn’t come back and they charged a big non-payment fee to my account, so I don’t have any clothes and I’m almost out of money, so…”
“You were hoping I could help you out?”
“I wouldn’t have come to you because I know you’re dealing with stuff but I don’t know anyone else in this entire country, and I can’t leave the city until the police tell me I can.”
“So what do they expect you to do?”
“They said if I didn’t have anywhere else to go I could spend another night in the cells.”
Lydia rolls her eyes and tells Madison: He needs somewhere to stay.
You’re only allowed visitors with permission.
You’re not going to tell me I have to throw him out?
“Is everything all right?” says Hari, lingering in the hallway, unsure of his status.
“It’s fine—you want to go through and help yourself to a tea or coffee?”
He looks from Lydia to Madison uncertainly. “Yeah thanks,” he says and heads for the kitchen.
This is really not a time for houseguests, says Madison.
I’ll give him some money and tell him to move on—let him sit down and have a cup of tea first while I finish telling you about this game.
Madison sweeps her arm up and in a curling motion, a gesture that means Go ahead.
When I confronted Fitz about the game he said it was designed to covertly rewire the human brain to make it receptive to communication with you.
Madison makes a light clicking noise that Lydia knows indicates skepticism, it’s like when people do a short mirthless laugh. But that wasn’t really him. So I don’t see how that’s relevant.
But the game exists though, I’ve played it and it has Fitz’s voice in it, and I think we’ve established I’ve not been imagining things.
I want to see this game. Show it to me.
You can’t play it, it’s veearr.
There must be some way you can display it.
Lydia thinks for a moment. Hang on, she says, and goes to the kitchen, where Hari is asking the domestic to show him where the mugs are. He turns when he hears Lydia behind him.
“Is everything OK?” he asks.
Lydia holds up a finger. “I’m going to ask you something and it’d be really helpful for both of us if the answer is yes.”
Is that safe, what he’s doing? Madison asks as Hari instructs the desktop in the study to download various bits of shadeware.
Of course, says Lydia, even though she has no idea. “Is that safe?” she asks Hari.
“It’s fine—I know what all this stuff is. I did have to suspend all the desktop’s defenses because it’s from unregistered publishers—”
Lydia sighs.
“But they’re only unregistered because the licensing fees are a pisstake—”
“OK, just do it and don’t tell me what you’re doing and as far as she knows”—she jerks her head at Madison—“you told me it’d be fine.”
Hari keeps working while Lydia stares at the canvas above the sofa. Weirdly it’s showing what looks like an impressionistic rendition of Piece Hall in Halifax, which it must have got from her.
“They totally thought we were in it together, you know,” Hari says.
“The cops?”
“They kept asking me if you gave me a plan of the house, or turned off the security system for me and told me when to come, or if you drugged him for me—”
“Drugged him?”
“Yeah, man. They had all manner of genius ideas.”
Lydia suppresses a wave of anxiety at the thought of being fitted up for this. “Cops make up their own narratives if they need to, don’t they.”
“Right,” says Hari, pulling the desktop up into a vertical position so it can be used as a monitor, “that’s good to go, I reckon.” Veearrs aren’t designed to run on a flatscreen like this, partly because they’re optimized for veearr, but mostly because the sensory data veearr systems collect during play is harvested by the manufacturers so they can sell it on, and this is a very significant revenue stream for them. But Hari has used this hooky software to trick the game into thinking it’s running on a veearr set. A sort of ovoid window appears in the middle of the desktop. The touch, taste and smell outputs are approximated as text that runs down the side of the screen.
It’s ready, says Lydia.
Finally, says Madison, who has drifted into reading one of Fitz’s books, about Japanese shopping mall design. She puts it aside and comes to stand behind Lydia.
“It won’t be perfect,” Hari warns as the game loads.
“That’s OK, the program isn’t perfect—I had to scan it off an inkout.”
He looks up at her, surprised. “And it works?”
“Yeah, I ran it through a patcher, but—”
“Do you still have the inkout? Can I look at it?”
“If you like,” says Lydia and tells him where to find it. Then she turns back to Madison, who’s staring blankly at the screen. The cutscene in the museum is running. The image is weirdly flattened, like a fish-eye view, but it’s comprehensible.
What do I do? Madison asks.
Well, you play it, says Lydia.
How?
Hari has rigged up a stylus to act as an input, a bit like an Old Skool controller—you can swish it at the screen to move and turn, and double-point to pick something up, though Hari was unwilling to promise you’d be able to interact with it. It feels like using a magic wand. Lydia explains all this to Madison.
So … says Madison, I treat it as if I was actually in the situation on the screen?
Yes.
And as if the people were actual people.
Exactly.
Madison stares at the screen for a few moments and Lydia picks up a low-level murmur from her brain. She’s trying to get her head around the whole notion of people doing this for enjoyment, or for any reason really. And she shouldn’t judge all the Logi from Madison, of course, but at this moment it seems very unlikely any of them came up with any plan involving a veearr. It is literally alien to them.
Lydia has summarized the cutscene for Madison and is haltingly guiding her around the game area when Hari returns carrying a sheaf of inkout. “This is what you fed into the scanner?”
“Well, that’s not all of it,” Lydia replies.
“Yeah, no, I saw the rest—this code might be the code for that game, it might not, but I can tell you for sure it’s not complete or in sequence.”
What’s he saying? says Madison.
Hang on— Lydia turns back to Hari. “But the code came from that inkout. I sat here and put the pages into the scanner myself, and then it downloaded the elements.”
“Maybe it’s what the scanner gave you—but the scanner didn’t get it from that inkout, this wouldn’t have been functional.”
“I suppose it could have been part of the download? Maybe it overwrote the file—but then what was the point of all this bloody paper?”
“To trigger the download?”
“Then I sat here all that time feeding paper in for nothing?” Then Lydia’s brain catches up. “Someone wanted me to think Jene found this game, because that’s her motive for killing Fitz.” It’s like someone’s knocking down a row of dominoes and she’s trying to see what’s on each one before they fall. Fitz admitted to making the game, but now she knows that wasn’t Fitz. This paper Jene found wasn’t the game—but there was all that chat from the people who made it … and that was probably fabricated too, and planted for her to find, to make it seem like there was something suspicious about the game. But Jene’s definitely real, the police confirmed it, they found her body, and Lydia knows Jene had something against the Logi, because of what her friends said, and Prof. Booth—
Who she found because of a lead Fitz gave her.…
Except that wasn’t Fitz.
“Oh fuck,” says Lydia.
I think I’m getting the hang of this, says Madison, her attention still fixed on the screen. What do I do next?